Friday, October 17, 2014

"Mr. Turner" at the HIFF

We attended Hamptons International Film Festival showing of the new film Mr Turner, written and directed by Mike Leigh. The film is a biopic of the renown and beloved English painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. Timothy Spall won the Best Actor award at the 2014 Cannes Film festival for his portrayal of Turner in all of his creative, eccentric, abrasive, glory. Spall studied art for two years in preparation for the role.

Mike Leigh recreates Turner's world with amazing attention to detail. The film beautifully captures a moment depicted in Turner's watercolor, The Artist and his Admirers. The Old Library at Petworth House, the Egremont ancestral home, was used by Turner as a studio. The 3rd Earl of Egremont was a patron and a friend, "Egremont's unconventional household of rival mistresses, swarms of children and visiting artists" became a "grand extended family" (Tate bio here).

“You can research and read for a million years and a zillion
books, but it doesn’t make it happen in front of a camera. Everyone knows
Turner went to the Royal Academy in 1832 on varnishing day (a sociable day just
before the opening of a show to the public, which was a sort of unofficial
private view, when artists gave their work a final lick and a promise, a coat
of extra varnish at the very least) and put this red blob on a grey painting
next to Constable’s, then turned it into a buoy and Constable said, ‘He has
fired a gun’ and walked out. And that is fine, you can read that, but you’ve
still got to make it happen and explore it on screen.” And Leigh does explore
it as Turner shockingly adds his scarlet daub to the seascape Helvoetsluys as
if he were vandalizing his own work – until, with targeted panache, he turns
the blob into a recognizable buoy. We see James Fleet’s dismayed Constable
fearing his own wings have been permanently clipped. – from an interview with
Mike Leigh here in The Guardian.

We are able to see the world through Turner's eyes via the amazing cinematography of Dick Pope. According to an interview with Pope on Indiewire here: "I studied Turner's color palette quite a lot at the Tate Britain. Which is a fantastic resource for everything Turner - even the paints he used. We took that, and in a way the film is colored very much in the palette of what Turner was using at the time.We used the paints that he was buying in the color shop as our own palette."